DUEVEL Bella Luna Diamante

MJ17.09.2014

Floorstanding loudspeakers

The Bella Luna Diamantes are unique with their high frequencies radiator, the unusual design of midrange and bass units, and the way they interact with listening environment. What does it mean for a listener? Speed, neutral balance and incredibly large sweet spot that is virtually anywhere in the room.

 

Function and form

76%
Ease of use
64%
Sound
76%
Appearance

The Bella Luna Diamante is a 2-way speaker in a kind of hybrid arrangement. The lower enclosure (the one with diamond cut facettes) houses a bass driver, a carbon reinforced 22cm cone that fires upwards.  The enclosure looks like a closed box from outside but it is not - there are four reflex ports hidden in the corners that fire downwards. One of the corners also provides binding posts that do not support bi-wiring.

The top of the speaker is occupied by a big deflector - this is the piece that looks like an UFO. The deflector is machined from a thick slab of plywood and houses a tweeter (44mm titanium cone with a Nomex voice coil and neodymium magnets) that fires downwards. The defector substitues an omnidirectional horn that disperses acoustic energy 360° in space. The bottom part of the UFO is shaped to deflect the midrange/bass energy coming from the main enclosure upwards.

As the result all drivers radiate sound in a symmetrical vertical field and the sound is 'sculpted' by the deflector.

Bass management

Weight
66
Slam
60
Articulation
61

A system like the Bella Luna Diamante needs very careful voicing and Duevel spent years to hone these speakers to perfection.The integration of bottom octaves is superb. Excellent recordings, like Reference Recordings' Harry james & His Bigband sound excellent and the bass does not lack the weight and clarity. Due to a different dispersion pattern in midrange I only miss a bit more explosiveness - the sound is basically right but without the transient punch that can be heard with conventional top designs.

Clarity & delicacy

Detail
62
Air
78
Transparency
63

Moving from the bass to midrange the things start to be very different. While in the conventional designs the music pours out of the drivers or is spat on to the listener, with the Bella Luna Diamante the music blooms.

The Duevels appreciate when not pushed into corners. It is natural because that way the radial dispersion is blocked. There is one important thing to take care of: the distances to front and rear wall should not be identical to prevent adding and subtracting the waveforms in a regular pattern.

It surprise me how sensitive the Bella Luna Diamantes are to toe-in. The speakers are symmetrical to verical axis, like a vase, so I obviously assume that the toe-in will have no or minimum impact on sound. The opposite is true. I count this may be due to the mutual interaction of bassreflex port system that is morphing by how the relative positions of speakers are. In my concrete conditions the worst sound balance was achieved when the enclosures were "parallel", that is when the "front" baffles were parallel with the front wall - the bass was bloaty and mids flat. Do not ask me why.

Tonal accuracy

Timbre
85
Dynamics
71
Temporal resolution
62

The symphonic colours are like opium through the Duevels. Bowed strings are sweet and silky, but very resolved. Many speakers trade off the silkiness for loss of resolution and microdetail. This is not the case with the Bella Lunas. Sure, it is the natural acoustics of the listening room that helps sculpt the final sound more than with conventional dynamic speakers but who cares. In real life (in a concert hall) the sound is also shaped by the surroundings, something that is damped in a studio and then artificially added via reverb. The Duevels do not fight the room, they concord with it.

Spatial resolution

Holography
92
Soundstage width
92
Soundstage depth
96

I am not sure whether these speakers can be bencchmarked against existing competitors. Who the competitors are, after all? At 8,000 € one can have quite versatile Usher's CP- 8571 Diamond DMD, ultraprecise GamuT's M'inenT M5 or visually striking Sonus Faber's Olympica II. None of aforementioned speakers offer comparable experience, the sonic filed that embraces you rather than is built in front of you. The Duevel Bella Luna Diamante is a king of panoramic soundstage that pulsates around you, that absorbs you and that makes you participate at the performance. Japanese Luxman defines afterglow - the act of sound forever decaying into utter silence - as one of the goals of high end. The Duevel Bella Luna Diamante shows one of the possible ways to it.

Price as reviewed:210 000,- Kč

Recommended resellers

AudioRanny, Praha, tel. +420 777 003 134

Associated components

  • Sources: Van Medevoort CD transport CT460 a DAC DA466
  • Amplifiers: Van Medevoort PA462 power amplifier and Audiofederation  AF PPXLR (by Van Medevoort) preamplifier
  • Interconnects and speaker cables: Actinote Sonata
  • Power conditioning: IsoTek Aquarius

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